[tomw2005]

> Publications should be judged on their content

They are but it takes time to build that reputation. Also publishing houses with big pockets can hire good reviewers etc and get established quicker. If Nature churned out rubbish papers all the time people would stop trusting it but their hit rate is pretty high and retractions are issued for poor papers.

There are some open source websites that are trusted (e.g. https://arxiv.org/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) but they are archiving content from already trusted journals. Then there is the 1 Open Source journal I would trust* : http://journals.plos.org/plosone/

I hope that we can accelerate this open sourcing in the years to come.

* I'm coming from a Medical Physics background. There may be others I'm not aware of that are also worthwhile.

[NotOscarWilde]

Are you sure you are well-informed about this? For instance:

* the scientific journals I know do not pay their scientific editors ([1], this can differ for absolute top journals like Nature/Science);

* arXiv is a preprint server, not an archiving server [2];

* you call "open source" what is usually called "open access", I think.

[1]: https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/43574/how-much-...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv

[tomw2005]

1) I was trying to talk in general terms. I understand that the peers doing the peer review are usually not paid but that there are other editors involved. I probably should have made that more clear. One of my fellow PhD students is now an editor for a journal.

2) I was aware of this also. I have seen some weird stuff on arXiv but it is normally trustworthy within the realms of Physics. I must admit my use of it was higher as an undergrad than a postgrad. Again I was probably being imprecise in my terminology but it is an archive of pre-prints.

3) 'Slip of the tongue'. I'll edit that in my original comment. Turns out you can't edit a comment after that long. I didn't know that but I think that is probably a good idea overall. I meant Open Access not Open Source.

I would consider myself pretty well informed as I was in academia until a move to industry a few years back and still work fairly closely with academics. That being said I am always happy to be corrected, I know people's opinions on this subject are a moving target and it is probably different at different hierarchies within academia. Thanks.

[monodeldiablo]

See, this is the point I still don't understand. None of the things you mentioned involve the publisher or title of the journal. All of those reputational aspects are functions of the reviewers and editors, right?

The people accepting and reviewing the papers are the sole source of any journal's value. I mean, people didn't stop listening to Lou Reed or Prince or Radiohead just because they switched labels. Nobody buys music because of the label.

So what's stopping a mass defection of a reputable journal's editorial staff to a new, open title? I'd expect this level of brand loyalty from mindless consumers buying material junk, but not from a scientific community supposedly dedicated to objectivity and quality.

[woliveirajr]

But you don't know the reviewers when you are looking for articles about something.

Reviewers aren't related to the articles: you don't know who reviewed your paper, and in good practices reviewers won't know the author of the papers either. The point of trust is the journal: the journal has its impact, its reputation, built as good articles are published and cited. And the cycle goes on: good reviewers means good articles published (on the average), that attracts attention to the journal, that will be looked for new articles and will attract better reviewers, that will do better revision, that...

Want to break that? Begin to give credit to the reviewers, and it will be gamified too: people will have to pay to publish with good reviewers (and there will be impartiality?), or they will make a journal/company so that you take off the weight of the reviewers names and will put the impact factor on the journal... ops...

[roel_v]

"There are some open source websites that are trusted (e.g. https://arxiv.org"

Lol. Citing arxiv is even worse than citing wikipedia, and some reviewers will reject arxiv citations all together. It's full of junk 'science' by crackpots. Not just 'hey look I ran this regression on a public dataset' bad, but all-out 'I was abducted by aliens, and I made up an equation to show that they took me to Pluto' bad. Maybe it differs by field, I don't know - but suggesting arxiv is 'trusted' the same way Nature is 'trusted' is inane.

[lorenzhs]

Yeah, nobody would consider an arXiv-only article by an unknown author. There are plenty of P=NP "proofs" published on the arXiv. But that isn't what it is for. It's a preprint server where you have to do your own quality control. A lot of work in the theoretical CS community is published in conferences and on the arXiv, often in extended form (additional proofs, plots, etc that didn't fit into the conference publication's page limit)

From https://arxiv.org/help/general: "Disclaimer: Papers will be entered in the listings in order of receipt on an impartial basis and appearance of a paper is not intended in any way to convey tacit approval of its assumptions, methods, or conclusions by any agent (electronic, mechanical, or other)."

[tomw2005]

I was not meaning to equate ArXiv to Nature. I can see how I implied that though.

As I've said in another comment it was used much more frequently during my undergrad years than at postgrad. Within Maths and Physics it is generally trustworthy as they are pre-prints of papers to established journals.

Would I cite an arxiv reference in a paper for submission or thesis? 99% of the time, no. Useful for citing on the web though where your users may not have access to the final journal article behind a paywall.